Festival Beerfest Asia

During the festival, local and international artists -backed by Aero sound systems - took the stage

Munich´s "Oktoberfest" meets its match in Asia´s "Beerfest". Recently, Singapore welcomed the first edition of the new beer festival, "Beerfest Asia 2009," celebrated beneath a 30 x 70 meter tent. Over 1.500 people attended, and over 25 brands of beer got the party flowing. Singapore Flyer offered over 100 varieties for tasting in their stand as well as in the pit stop area of Singapore´s Formula 1 (F1 tracks-Racing Marina Barrage).

During the five day festival, local and international artists - backed by Aero sound systems - took the stage by storm. Among them were "Hell´s Belles", a girl-powered tribute to AC/DC, and "Vertical Horizon", USA-style rock direct from Washington, D.C. Playing together since 1990, their disc "Everything You Want" once reached number 1 on the American pop charts. Other artists in the festival included groups such as Goodfellas, Heritage, Reverie & Rene, 53A and Jack & Rai.

Eduardo López, commercial representative of D.A.S. Audio Asia, shared his thoughts on how this event got started: "D.A.S. Audio Asia and the company "Timbre Music Group" were excited about possible collaborations since the beginning of the year. When "Timbre Music" began to organize Beerfest festival 2009, we saw a great opportunity to get involved with the management and creation of the event´s sound system. Looking over the list of artists, we were quite content to support international artists who would be taking the stage, and to work with professionals like "CSP Productions", "NLX Event Services" and "GSL Productions", who all worked together to make Beerfest flow smoothly.

D.A.S. Audio flew in 8 units of Aero 38 line array systems (four for each side of the stage) with 8 ground stacked units of Aero 218 Sub (four on each side as well) as a P.A. Ron Koh, technical support for products and projects at D.A.S Asia, has this to say with reference to systems installed for the event: "Due to the unusual limitation of erecting the stage within a tent, the event equipment could not surpass a height of a mere 6 meters, which is why we opted for this configuration".

On both sides of the stage were tables for the audience with 8 powered CA-28A (four each flanking the stage in a left-right configuration) using a special rigging system provided by "GSL Productions" to give 180 degrees of sound coverage with the Aero 38. Ron Koh mentions: "With 4 CA-28A previously stacked and aligned with the Ease Focus program on the transport dolly PL-28S the only thing left to do was get the AX support and hook it up to the first box. Once we did this, we placed it beneath the motor to suspend the speakers, and let the system fly."

Ron Koh was joined by the engineers D.A.S Pablo Seoane and Joan La Roda, who came from Spain especially for the event as well as Grammy-winning engineer/mixer/musician Rob Thomas mixing engineer for the groups "Vertical Horizon" and "Kings of Leon". Thomas gave the system rave reviews: "The bass coming out of the Aero 218 Sub was extraordinary. Furthermore it seemed to me that the Aero 38 gave very even coverage." Also worth a mention were the auto-amplification units D.A.S used during the concerts. Though Hell´s Belles are constantly touring the world with their band, it was their first encounter with the SM-15A. The band made use of them together with Compact 2, a "drum fill" module, and were more than pleased with the results. Jamie Nova, lead Singer in the band exclaimed after the concert, "It sounded crazy on-stage!" Eddy Chung, engineer for the Hells in Singapore, was also surprised by his first experience using the SM-15A: "I barely had to do anything to equalize the monitors; their response to the variable frequencies was very consistent. All I had to do was take it down a decibel or two in one or two of the frequencies."